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Last night Danny Sullivan broke the news on a new free service Google is offering named Google Sitemaps. Simply put, this program allows "webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they'd like to have included in Google's web index." Danny Sullivan has been pressing Google about such a program since even before the Indexing Summit, where he repeated that many would pay Google for inclusion and reporting. So Google took Danny's advice, and built a "beta" version of a free program to submit your pages and some simplified reporting. For more information on Google Sitemaps from Google, visit Google Sitemaps Docs, and also see the Google Blog.
So what are the forums saying about this? Search Engine Watch Forums quickly got a thread up in which GoogleGuy and the new "SitemapsAdvisor" have been answering questions on this program.
Other forums chatting about this: - DigitalPoint Forums - SEO Chat Forums - WebmasterWorld (Paid) - Cre8asite Forums - HighRankings - SitePoint Forums
Social Patterns has two excellent blog entries on this topic. First one is named Breaking Down Google Sitemaps XML and the second is named Google Sitemaps with Wordpress where he links to code you can use for WordPress blogs to generate a sitemap for Google.
Comments:
Max
06/03/2005 04:47 pm
Very good stuff, but seams like their page is down - can't get through for 20 minutes now. I'm just curious how to generate last updated date and time for dynamic pages.. maybe just use the timing data from database.
Sebastian
06/06/2005 07:03 pm
Max, I wrote a short tutorial on this: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=133&largePage=TRUE#part3 I'd not use the page's database timestamp in general. At least not without giving the user/author the chance to decide whether the (often minor) change is worth a resubmit. I've enabled the date of last modification on the CMS' user interface. HTH
Ethan
06/07/2005 06:52 pm
I wrote a little tutorial on my blog on how to create a Sitemap for a large site using Xenu Link Sleuth and Excel. One of my sites has almost 10,000 pages and I wanted to get a Sitemap created over the weekend to test. I am holding off on using development resources until we see the effects. http://www.ethangiffin.com/?p=29 Ethan p.s. - I too think this a a great idea